They were thoughts of Teresa, of what he had innocently brought upon her. To save her pain he would himself have gone through immeasurable miseries, but no pang of his could lighten hers, or ward the jealous fury that might sting and embitter her life. Where was she? Behind some cold palazzo wails of Venice, suffering through him? He knew not even her name now. Should they never meet again?
She loved him. When and how she had crossed that indistinguishable frontier mattered nothing. The fact remained. When had he ever been loved before, he thought. Not Lady Caroline Lamb; hers was an aberrant fancy, an orchid bred of a hothouse life in London. Not Annabel, his wife; she had loved the commiseration of her world more than she loved him. Not Jane Clermont—he shuddered as he thought of her. For he knew that not for one ephemeral moment of that reckless companionship had a real love furnished extenuation.
“Now,” he told himself, “I, who could not love when I might, may not when I can. Yet in spite of the black past that bars my life from such as Teresa’s—I love her! In spite of all—though for both of us it is an impossible condition, impossible then since I was chained to a marriage in England, doubly impossible now since she is bound by a marriage here. I love her and she loves me! And our love can be only what the waves of hell were to Tantalus!”
He struck the littered sheets of paper with his hand, as a heavier gust of wet wind rattled the casement. “Darkness and despair!” he said aloud. “That is all my pen can paint now!”
A door opened and Padre Somalian entered.
The friar surveyed the scene of tempest from the window a moment in silence; then approached the table and sat down.
“You are at work, my son?” he inquired in English.
The tone was mild as a child’s. Since his penance after that scene by the shrine, the eye of the padre had seen truer. But he had asked the man before him nothing.
“Only idle verses, Padre.”
“Why idle?”